It turns out that the Mitch Turner case has disturbed me at some deep level, however, for in my sleep my dead partner and soul brother Pichai comes to me, or rather I visit him. He sits in a circle of meditating monks who exude honey-colored glows and at first does not want to be disturbed. I insist, and slowly he emerges from his divine trance. Want to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.
I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That’s Pichai at his most gnomic, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?
4
By the time I finally get up, it’s early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.
Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He’s been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.
Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit’s call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. “With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon.” Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.
“Have you spoken to your mother yet?” He has managed to make his head lower than mine so that his delicate face is turned up to me like a flower, his hazel eyes oozing charm. In a feudal society everything is feudal, which is to say personal. I am not merely his supervisor, I’m his lord and master, and his fate rests in my hands. He needs me to love him.
“Give me time,” I say. “With women the mood is everything. Especially with Nong.”
“Are you going to speak to Colonel Vikorn?”
“I don’t know. It’s a judgment call.” I have the cab stop at the junction of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit.
The story of our errand goes like this. Once upon a time, not more than five or ten years ago, every side soi on Sukhumvit boasted at least one stall that sold fried grasshoppers, but with the relentless blanket bombing of our culture by yours, farang, we grew somewhat self-conscious about this quaint weakness of ours, with the result that-in Krung Thep, anyway-our insect cuisine was driven underground. At the same time, though, avant-garde farang cottoned on to this culinary exoticum with the enthusiasm of the pretentious, so that now the one place where you can buy fried grasshoppers is the farang-dominated Nana Plaza.
We arrive at Nana just when the various hunting lodges, known as go-go bars, are shifting into top gear. “Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in black tank top calls out to me over the palisade of one of the beer bars, but Lek’s star is far brighter than mine. Neither the girls nor the katoeys (transsexuals to you, farang) can take their eyes off him as we push our way past mighty Caucasian bodies in sweaty T-shirts and walking shorts, half drunk more with the sexual opportunities than with the alcohol, although everyone is knocking back ice-cold beer from the bottle. This evening every TV monitor, and there must be about five hundred, is tuned to a tennis match between our very own Paradorn and someone nobody cares about in the French Open. There’s no commentary, however, because the ten thousand sound systems are all booming out the usual combination of Thai pop and Robbie Williams.
Finally we reach the far end of the plaza, which is dominated by katoeys who drool at the sight of Lek. In a serious breach of authenticity the stall owner at the back of the plaza has labeled his various products in English: waterbug, silkworm, mole cricket, ant mix, dried frog, bamboo worm, scorpion, grasshopper. I load up on grasshoppers for me, waterbugs, silkworms, mixed ants, and dried frogs for Mum. While the vendor is pouring ants into a paper cone, Lek and I spare a moment to watch a ritual that is far more ancient than Buddhism. Young women in short frilly dresses-this is a bar where the schoolgirl fantasy is intermittently and imprecisely invoked-are standing behind one another in a line with their legs apart while the girl at the front draws elaborate shapes on the ground with a large wooden phallus. When the luck god has been summoned, she sends the phallus skidding across the floor between the girls’ feet, then bangs loudly on the door to the club. Straightening herself with the air of a job well done (if that doesn’t bring in the johns, I don’t know what will), she leads the girls back into the bar and the twenty-first century.
Back at the club I make sure that Lek carries the little bags of insects and hands them to my mother, who has not yet opened for business. (She was waiting for supper.) We all sit down in the bar to eat what, I suppose, is breakfast, and for twenty minutes there is silence save for the snapping of legs and the squirting of guts. When I’ve finished, I leave Lek with my mother while I climb the stairs with the last packet of grasshoppers.
Chanya is awake and beautifully rested after her prolonged sojourn in the arms of Morpheus. She is wearing an outsize T-shirt and nothing else, sitting in a half-lotus on the bed with her back against the wall. I offer her the open packet, and she delicately picks out a fat one to munch. She flashes me a comradely smile marred only by the remains of a hairy leg in the corner of her mouth, apparently suffering no ill effects from her killing spree beyond a touch of nervousness in her eyes as I hand her her statement. (The advantage of a culture of shame as opposed to one of guilt is that you don’t start to feel bad until the shit hits the fan.)
She reads it carefully, then looks up. “You wrote it? This is your writing.”
“The Colonel dictated. I simply wrote it down.”
“Colonel Vikorn? He must be a genius. This is exactly how it happened.”
“Really?”
“Every detail is correct, except he drank Budweiser, not Mekong whiskey.”
“A minor detail. Let’s not bother to change it. I’ll corroborate Mekong if it comes to that. I was behind the bar, after all.”
That iron-melting smile: “That’s fine then.”
I cough and try not to look too sadly at her long black hair. “Just one thing-you’ll have to cut your hair and disappear for a while. Do something else, be someone else for a couple of months, until we can see how the land lies.”
A shrug and a smile. “Okay, whatever the Colonel says.”
“We’ll bring you back to work as soon as we can. We have to know what the Americans are going to do when they find out what’shisname is dead. How heavy will they get? How valuable was he to them? You see the problem?”
“Of course. I’ll probably cut it all off-I’ve always wanted to meditate in a nunnery. Maybe I’ll do a meditation course upcountry somewhere.”
“That’ll be fine,” I say, although the thought of her losing all her hair almost moves me to tears. A slightly awkward silence. “Chanya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if there’s anything you did in the States when you were over there that you think we should know about…”